Smoke, sense and sensibility.

I was visiting the medical school campus at Boston University a few days back. And I noticed 'irony' in its most uncanny form. A bunch of smart, savvy, young minds, mindlessly dispensing snow white fumes from 4-inch sticks, pushing sensibility to oblivion. The stark irony; this picteresque cynicism was outside the Lung Cancer Research Deparment in the med campus. I was at loss of words or reason, when I tried to reason how a bunch of scientists (or so I presume), could devote a whole lifetime to study a rampant addiction and yet cool their heels by being addicted rampantly to the same addiction.In school I learnt 'necessity is the mother of invention". However I am still in the process of genotyping the DNA behind 'Nicotine addiction' to find who its mother is. Smoking is injurious, smoking kills, smoking puts you at a health risk blah blah blah..we have heard it all, we know it all, and yet we still do it all. Why?

How cool is it to puff in a heady cocktail of 4000 chemicals, many of them known carcinogens, sifting the smoke into the deep alveoli of our lungs, reducing them to a chimney to filter tar. Its so obviously wrong, that if it were mathematics, it would be axiomatic to conclude "smoking is wrong" like "multiplying by zero gives you a zero". And that is what you smokers are doing, multiplying your life with a cigarette to get a zero. The sad part being the zero carried over to your near and dear(which I am not sure about) ones.

Many of my very good friends are smokers, and I have passively inhaled half their sorrows, their tensions, their depression. And believe me every whiff is more depressing than the previous one. And when I try to sound my "quit smoking" alarm, I get a indignant "you don't know, you have to do it to know". I am at loss, trying reason why I should do it. I have also heard the oafish "ohh my god its so cool" deep breaths about smoking. But what astonishes me is the transition this stamina stick brings in smokers. One puff brings a certain swagger to a tremble, a whiff of lewd tobacco can concieve a great idea, a four inch stick I can't believe can actually dispense inhibitions into a air of chutzpah. I don't like to pontificate or be a moral witholder, but to me, people who tend to hide behind a smoke screen, trying to blow away their fears with the something as cheap as tobacco need to do some thinking, without the stick, of course.

"I am going to quit tommorow", "this is my last cigarette","I can quit whenever I can", "one cigarette doesn't hurt", "I just smoke one a day"....
DONT LIE TO YOURsELF.

During my good ol' days, I was assigned to a project with one of my friends. Planning an approach, zeroing in on a date to start and deciding when to stop procrastinating brought us three days within the deadline. We both were gladiators of "last ditch effort" fame; working 36 hrs at a stretch with him made me realize what a curse smoking is.

Every step was validated by a cigarette, each milestone was labelled by a cigarette, it became both the motivation and the reward for the effort, the project was shabbily reduced to a smoke fest. At the end of it, I came out huffing, stifled, smoked filled, disgusted and one friend less....

Smokers, its your life, your body, and your right to be masoschistic, but please don't try to justify it because I don't buy what you sell. Smoke when others are not around because we breathe the same air, and we have the same right as you to do to decide not to be smoke. I don't want to be cool, I just want to live. So thanks but no thanks.....

Ramblings

There are times when life just speeds by, sailing through time at a frightening pace. Faces we know becomes mere milestones on the road to nowhere, words become ramblings that echo from time to time without any purpose or meaning; Routine becomes a compulsive, vicious stranglehold.

The remarkable irony, I just discovered, is that we realize life is a journey when we are on a actual journey. When we are between a source and a destination, in the middle of nowhere, maybe happy to be going somewhere, or sad to go away from somewhere, but nonetheless, the journey sometimes sums up what you are with such eloquence, that the overemphasis makes you miss the point. For example, I never realized I am a rambler. I ramble on and on with no rhyme or reason. This one is a prime example of what I am trying to say. Before I embarked upon this utterly non adventurous 4-hour bus ride, I had meticuluosly planned out every minute of my existence in the bus to the atomic detail. Being a PhD student, I lack the so called proverbial "life". I am always catching up on the subjects, finishing assignments, dodging deadlines, wishing I could learn how to play to guitar (maybe next semester, no, no, definitely the next semester), finding an excuse of not doing it the last semester, trying to rationalize where does all the time go and so on. And then on this bus journey I made a realization, I plan, but don't execute. I try to chew more than I can bite.
And this important self analysis was worth penning or rather 'keyboarding' down.
But what I wonder is, how often we all realize what we need to do, what we lack, what we aren't good at, how well we should have been prepared for that day, how organized we should be etc etc, but never seem to answer the how, what and why. In fact realizations are like mosquito bites, it pinches for microsecond, itches for a while and then all of us forget that we fed an insect a while ago. I hope someday I get the resolve to act on the bite, before its turns into a malarial condition.......